Customer Touchpoints | Definitions, strategies, & expert interviews

What are customer touchpoints and our 5 step guide to doing your own touchpoint analysis.

TL;DR

  • Customer touchpoints are any interactions between a customer and a brand, including digital, physical, and indirect encounters that influence perception, satisfaction, and purchasing behavior.
  • Touchpoints span the entire customer journey across pre purchase, purchase, and post purchase stages, including ads, website visits, sales interactions, order tracking, customer service, emails, reviews, and social media.
  • Each touchpoint shapes customer expectations and emotions, making them critical drivers of conversion, retention, loyalty, and overall revenue performance.
  • A customer touchpoint analysis involves five steps: planning objectives and personas, mapping all touchpoints, collecting and analyzing feedback data, prioritizing friction points, and measuring improvements over time.
  • Effective touchpoint optimization requires linking friction points to business impact metrics such as CSAT, NPS, churn, customer lifetime value, and revenue.
  • Using AI powered feedback and support ticket analytics enables businesses to identify high impact friction areas at scale, prioritize fixes, and continuously improve customer experience across all channels.

Customer touchpoints are essential to understanding your customer's journey. 66% of companies now compete primarily on customer experience. This makes sense given that 86% of buyers will pay more for a great experience.

What's in the guide?

  1. What are customer touch points?
  2. Examples of customer touch points
  3. The typical touch points in a customer journey
  4. What makes touch points important?
  5. How to do a touchpoint analysis (5 steps in detail)
  6. Touchpoint FAQs
  7. We've also created a complete guide to customer journey mapping here.

What are customer touchpoints?

‍ A touchpoint is any interaction (including encounters where there is no physical interaction) that might alter the way that your customer feels about your product, brand, business or service.

Customer journey definition (and what's the difference)

If a customer touchpoint is a singular unit, a touchpoint map is an inventory of those touch points. A touchpoint map should not be confused with a customer journey or journey map.

What are the stages of a customer journey?

A customer journey can be many parts of their interaction with your brand, such as visiting your website, browsing for products, and so on.

Customer touch points examples

Typical customer touch points for most businesses include an element of bricks and mortar, a website, a call centre, post, email, customer service/support and sales.

Why are touch points important in the customer journey?

The most important thing about touch points is that they are where people form opinions about your company.

Why is optimising customer touch points online beneficial for businesses?

Most businesses aim to maximise profit and every customer touchpoint will have an impact on revenue and cost.

Customer touchpoint analysis: How to do a customer touchpoint analysis in 5 simple steps

  1. Planning your touchpoint analysis: Prepare for customer touchpoint analysis by identifying objectives and research methods.
  2. Measuring your consumer touchpoint baseline: Map each customer touchpoint from pre-purchase to purchase.
  3. Gather & analyse customer feedback data: Collect data via interviews or using software tools.
  4. Take action on your analysis: Develop a plan to improve underperforming touchpoints.
  5. Measure improvements made to each touchpoint: Track movement in customer satisfaction metrics following changes made.

Touchpoint FAQs

What is a brand contact point?
A brand contact point is just another name for a customer touchpoint.